Regards,
Susannah Thorpe
Head of Security, Redford Castle
Formaldehydegives me all the confirmation I need. With a quick promise to come see Lydia after the ball, I flee the kitchens as though my ass is on fire.
32
SOUND OF PALATINO
ERIC
It’s five in the evening, and I haven’t seen Francesca all day. By my count, it’s been nine hours and twenty-three minutes. I’ve been counting because those numbers are easier to process than the amount of hands I’ve had to shake. Lord this, Lady that—Sylvaine has dressed me up as the mascot for courtship between the Duchy and the Crown.
Thought Sheffolk hated outsiders, and here they are, treating me like the second coming.Eric, I love your aesthetic; Eric, don’t scowl, you’ll scare the elderly; and Eric, stand over there and smile.I’m sick of it.Worse is that I once convinced myself this place would despise me, and I almost long to return to that state of utter delusion.
Lord Havardly held me captive and told me about all fifty-seven of his granddaughters, so I haven’t even had a chance to read Francesca’s previous messages. By the time he finished, I’d aged a year, he’d aged ten, and she’d deleted everything, replacing it with a simple‘I’ll tell you in person’.
And here I am, hours later, still waiting.
Her grandfather, on the other hand? Glued to my side. I know what he’s doing because the men in this family wouldn’trecognise subtlety if it crawled out of the grave and politely introduced itself. We do the gentlemanly rounds together and pretend we’re comrades in the same war. He never asks how I slept, though when he first sees me, he flicks lint from the centre of my chest, right where a second heartbeat had slept just hours earlier.
Sylvaine has tea served in the drawing room where I first met Francesca, and instead of listening to Lady Winifred recount her trip to Paris, I’m noticing how still Frank goes. He never lets his attention roost on anything in the rooms that watch back. In those spaces, our gazes repel one another like two equal magnetic poles. Wordlessly, he tells me that he knows this castle. Knows we’re being watched.
When he passes me a glass of white wine in the ballroom while we watch sculptors chip away at ice birds, for one absurd second, I wonder if he can smell it. Lavender body oil clinging to the space between my jaw and collarbone; the gravesite where Francesca buried her face.
Frank says nothing.
I say nothing louder.
Last night sits like an acid burn on my tongue: her pulse under my thumb as she drifted to sleep, her laugh when Tommy shoved me, how she leaned in before pressing her lips to mine, and her blunt murder confession. Frankmustread those memories in every twitch of my brows but still chooses to play dumb. Whatever he’s fighting against telling me, I’m not going to ask for it.
“You play?” he casually enquires when we pass the Fibonacci piano, seven figures right there on display, just waiting to be cracked open by some maestro. I try to picture his words as he speaks, mapping the shape of them, and I hear what he doesn’t say.
You’re aware this place is fucked up?
“Badly,” I answer, which basically meansI’d be blind not to notice.
We stand there a minute longer, two versions of the same role—him, the man from the original film, and me, the idiot in the reboot nobody asked for. Same set, same curse. How the fuck did I end up in the Sheffolk Cinematic Universe?
He says nothing else, probably because he spots the storm that is Winifred Fortescue advancing on us. Thalia trails after, a blushing loaded weapon, still dressed in that ruffled monstrosity of a coat. Frank apparently develops lockjaw, and his pulse visibly spikes so violently I almost expect him to drop dead before the ice wren. Somewhere during Winifred’s speech on sensible heirs, it all culminates in Frank and me booking it for the only trench left in Sylvaine’s war zone—St Nic’s, also known as Sheffolk’s smoke shack.
“So the rules don’t apply to you, I see. Youareaware of this morning’s situation, no?” I’m side-eyeing the half-filled crystal ashtrays laid out along an ancient mahogany table.
It’s absolutely ridiculous how much pride staffers take in guarding this dilapidated patch of a health hazard. Frank is a vertical strip of tweed glued against the rough stone wall, a cigarette idly held between two fingers. He gives me a lazy once-over and puffs another swirl of smoke towards my figure as though trying to fumigate me.
“Areyouaware, Highness, that I’m married to the ruling duchess?”
The slight arrogance to it almost makes me want to tell him that, since we’ve been here, at least seven different staffers have snuck off for a smoke break but dodged the building as soon as they saw the back of his head through the window.
I scoff instead, triggering his chuckles. “So marriage to the duchess gives you free rein, then.”
“Free reign?” He rolls the filter between his fingers and taps the ash into the tray. “My boy, I’ve got two dodgy knees, and we’ve been flung from one end of the castle to the other all morning, shaking hands and nodding at people I don’t even remember. I’veearnedthis bloody cigarette.”
I barely catch the rest of what he says after he calls me‘my boy’. Frank doesn’t even seem to register that he’s said it, and it’s a little nauseating that I’ve to reroute the meaning of those two words away from what I know them as.
A title. A leash.
